The Next Wave
by eschaton37
Summary: Takes place just after the events of the original game, contemporary with Episode 4 of Ultimate Doom. A mop-up mission to Phobos that encounters more opposition than expected. OC, rated T for violence and swearing.
1. Unexpected Opposition

Bob Swanson had hit the ground running. Twenty minutes after his arrival on Phobos, he was already holed up in the old command center. And it was a good thing, too.

His actual mission had only been reconnaissance. The base command men wanted to see if any enemies had survived the initial action. They said that the coast was almost certainly clear, but they wanted to be able to "assure all personnel that no enemy presence remains on Phobos."

They were wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong. But should that be a surprise? Only one Marine survived the last time, after all. It should have been obvious. But here he was, stuck in a decrepit building – a building with a toxic waste storage system full of leaks – and surrounded by alien _things _from the wrong side of the universe.

He watched the door. Twice - twice in twenty minutes! - he had nearly been ambushed by zombies. When they didn't groan, they moved very quietly. Luckily, they were slow - even if they snuck up on you, they were easy to shoot before they could do anything. They were terrible at aiming, too – worse than he could imagine a real human could be. There was another critter he'd met, though ... Well, in this small room, he could hold out against almost anything – there was only one door, which he could defend forever. But his mission was to explore the whole complex.

With an imprecation at the people who had assigned him here, he moved out cautiously. _Damned bureaucrats,_ he thought_, sending a man here with nothing more than a pistol – "suitable for any likely threat" my arse._

He moved carefully, completely alert. There had seemed to be a surprising number of zombies so far. Turning a corner, he muttered, "There you are, deadbrain!" He fired a single shot. "Tarnation!" It was only a grazing hit. The zombie turned on him, revealing the shotgun it carried. Leveling the barrel, it slowly began to aim - then fell backward as Bob's bullet tore into its head.

Bob gingerly picked the shotgun from the fingers of the ill-smelling zombie. He took an alcohol swab from his medical kit and wiped the stock. No one had any idea if zombies carried diseases, but they certainly _smelled _germy. Seeing that it was fully loaded, he chuckled. Now he was really in the pink. A shotgun! The worst thing he'd seen so far was a brown-scaled thing that looked like a man who had grown spikes on every joint. He had had trouble getting through those scales with just the pistol, but a good military slug gun like this one should take those guys down easily.

He opened the next door, stepping back as it rose. Behind it was one of those brown spiky beasts. "Speak of the devil!" he groaned. The thing was about five and a half feet tall and wasn't as muscular as Bob was, but it had nasty curved claws and a thick beak.

Before he could do anything, the spiky thing exhaled an ugly, grayish vapor and clacked its beak. It must have made a spark, because the creature's breath ignited! A flaming chemical cloud blew towards Bob.

"Damn!" he swore, dodging the fire, though the polluted vapors stung his eyes. He raised his gun; as soon as the tear cleared from his vision, he fired. The shotgun slug blew into the thing's chest. It fell dead, but Bob was a little shaken. They'd said in the briefing that these spiky things could breathe flammable gas, but he never imagined they had that kind of range! _Fire! _What was next, a biological plasma gun?

Recovering his composure, he walked over to the dead ... alien? Devil? He wasn't sure what it was - the scientists on Mars Base kept assuring everyone they were perfectly natural, if extra-terrestrial, organisms, but most of the other Marines called them demons. This _thing _was certainly ugly enough to be from Hell. Whatever its origins, it had nothing useful to take, unlike the zombie's gun.

He wondered what would be next. The briefing photos showed zombies, this thing, and a pink carnivore; and there were rumors of other things. At least he hadn't seen any of the Really Bad stuff people talked about. One man said that someone from the Deimos clean-up team saw something like a goat-headed man, only it was an ugly purplish-red like skinless muscle. Ugh! Bob hoped never to see anything like that.

Shrugging, he continued through the corridors of the command center. Duty called...


	2. A Survivor

After passing through a teleporter, Bob Swanson found himself in a small alcove above a room with toxic-waste barrels and some of the ugly, pink carnivorous demons. Shooting at the barrels, he began a chain reaction. The unstable waste - whatever it was - exploded in vast gouts of reddish flame, igniting nearby barrels, which exploded as well. Caught in the conflagration, the pink carnivores cooked, their flesh blackening and searing. Soon both threats were eliminated.

Descending carefully and traveling on, Bob soon came across a chaingun. Inspecting it closely, he found that it was still in quite good working condition, despite some shallow indentations - clearly tooth marks. There were a few reddish-brown, disturbing stains on the floor around the weapon, apparently left behind by demons that had devoured its wielder completely but were too stupid to recognize a chaingun as useful. _The pink ones, probably,_ Swanson mused; _they don't seem even as smart as dogs or alligators. Those use tactics when hunting; these just charge and bite, fearless of their own deaths. No animal on Earth is half as mean_. Shaking off his thoughts, Bob moved into the next room.

More pink demons! He put two of them down with a spray of chaingun fire. He paused briefly. Though both were safely dead, he could still hear footsteps, and occasionally the roaring sound they made. Moving more cautiously, he looked around the nearest corner and behind pillars, finger poised to press the trigger when he saw the demon.

Only a brief snort behind his head saved Bob. Whirling around, he found himself staring at a glassy, transparent, nearly _invisible _version of the pink,carnivorous demon! Firing reflexively, he placed thirty rounds in the creature before he had the nerve to stop.

As the spectral thing died, Bob heard a thud to his left. Turning, he managed to hold his fire. A _human_ had just jumped down from some hiding place in the ceiling!

Near-hysterically, the man cried out "Friend! Don't shoot!"

Bob lowered his barrel and inspected this man. Malnourished, emaciated, dressed in rags and decorated with ugly scars from poorly-healed wounds, it was clear that he had been surviving in this outpost of Hell for a very long time.

"Thank heaven! I've been here since the first expedition - weeks, months, decades, who knows? I hardly remember anything before; surviving hasn't left space for anything else in my brain. Even water and such -- I can only go at night, and even then carefully as anything, because there's a BIG fellow blocking it. You know those damned spike-critters; little brown imps, shorter than you or I, flaming spit? This thing's like that, but much, much bigger. And I've seen his fire-spit melt steel."

"Well, that's bad news", Swanson mused. "I need to get through there to complete my mission." Addressing the survivor; "I have to kill him. It's part of my mission; it's probably suicide, but I have to try."

Opening the door, he stepped into a new, enormous, star-shaped chamber...


	3. The Star Chamber

A horrid, close snort made Bob wheel to his left. It was one of the pink carnivores, this time very close. He had not seen them nearby before; the only one that had gotten close was almost invisible. But this thing was visible, and horrible. It was as tall as Bob was, but horribly overmuscled - it must have weighed five or six hundred pounds. Also, fully a third of it was mouth! Snorting, it lunged at him, huge toothy maw open to seize Bob's arm. He fired the shotgun - reflexively, and poorly aimed, but at this point blank range it hit anyway. The creature was momentarily forced back; leaping backwards, Bob aimed and fired twice more. Finally the creature ceased its attempted attack and lay dead.

_What is it? _he wondered. This was clearly no natural animal; the deadly claws on its three-toed feet, the short but strong hand-talons, the huge fangs and the pair of oversized tusks in the jaws, the sharp horns - all were lethal weapons. Simple evolution would not produce such an overdesigned killing machine; those mighty muscles would take a nearly impossible food intake to keep supplied. Perhaps it really was a demon from Hell...

His reverie was interrupted by a hideous roar. This was not the pink demon's snort, but something far deeper and louder. It sounded like a _big _creature. _What now - another horror?_

Then it came around the nearest corner of the star, and Bob could see it clearly. _Oh, shit, sh... _His mental curse was cut off as the creature hurled a ball of greenish, searing light. _Plasma! How... _Ducking and rolling, he evaded the blast, but he felt the burst of heat as it exploded, dissipating as it struck the wall. The radiation would certainly leave sunburns...

This thing was far worse than anything he'd seen yet, and it definitely wasn't in the briefings. It looked something like the giant red goat-demons he'd heard about; it had goatish legs and hooved feet, and a pair of massive horns sprouted from its head. But otherwise it looked like the brown imps - except that where those were slender and the size of a small human, this thing was muscled like Hercules and towered over Bob. It must have been eight feet tall at least.

This was the giant imp-thing the survivor he'd just met had told him about. Absurdly, at that moment, he realized he hadn't learned the man's name. Then another plasma bolt sizzled by, and Bob jerked to the right and pumped a shotgun shell into the monster's body. It didn't even hesitate, though the pellets drew blood. It raised its claws over its head, and electricity crackled between them. It was clearly charging up for a bigger plasma blast - probably one too large to dodge. He shot the creature's arms this time; it bellowed as it lost control of the plasma, which seared its arms and scalp. Clearly deciding to try a new method of attack, the giant goat-imp leapt forward, its claws spread and its beak, blunt but strong like the imps', open. It struck Bob clumsily, but its strength was immense; he was hurled back against the wall nonetheless. He fell half on his side; the creature stood over him, gloating, gathering plasma between its claws for an attack that would not only kill him, but blast his body to shreds. Bob finally felt the touch of despair.

And then the creature jerked convulsively, turned, and hurled the plasma blast in another direction. This spray of plasma was huge, making the air flicker with green-yellow light over a path at least ten feet wide. As Bob leapt to his feet, astonished at his seemingly miraculous reprieve, he saw the survivor he had met before dodging the immense bolt. As he safely cleared the blast's path, he bent down, grabbed another rock, and threw it at the gigantic monster! _I really need to learn his name... _Bob mused, as he fired two more shotgun shells into the creature, then reloaded. It had begun to turn back towards him; Bob fired once more, and then dodged to the left. He fired one more time, and _finally _the point-blank shots began to tell on the unnaturally tough creature. One more shot, and the creature collapsed, blood flowing from its wounds. He watched it carefully to make certain that it was definitely dead, then drew his pistol and put a bullet where its brain should be just in case. Only then did he turn and walk toward the other man...


	4. Towards the Gate

"You saved my life," Bob began. "Thank you very much, and..." he hesitated, "I never actually got your name."

"Oh?" the man chuckled. "I'm Timothy Wester, call me Tim. I'm a biologist; I was working on long-term studies of how the microgravity here affected animals over many generations. Then ... everything went to hell. It was awful. I saw seven people die in the first ten minutes of the attack, and I couldn't do anything. I wasn't armed, and I don't think bullets would stop some of the things I saw anyway. Spiders with swollen brains and metal bodies. There was a monster big as a house, horned, hooved, with a missile launcher! Half robot, half ... God knows what." He shuddered. "That ... cyber-demon ... took out a rover with a near miss, burst the air containment. Two men died right there. Then Jessica..."

"My condolences," Bob said gravely. "I never saw anything that terrible, and frankly, I hope I don't meet that cyber-demon. I wouldn't want to try facing it with this," indicating the shotgun and pistol.

"I should say not! Nothing could stop it, nothing... Someone fired on it before it blew him apart, he even had a plasma weapon, but it barely scorched the skin."

"You're a biologist? I don't suppose you know any special weaknesses of these things?"

"No, I've been busy surviving. But nonetheless, I've observed the monsters, when I wasn't running for them. This place seems to be one where they congregate; I think we should move on."

"I agree.", Bob said, and they began to move toward a narrow hallway, where they could not be surrounded. What kinds of creatures have you seen?"

"Zombies, or possessed people - whichever they are. Fire-spitters: brown spiky creatures, about the size and shape of a slender human, with vicious claws: they can spit balls of flaming chemicals. Twice, a man-eater: this _enormous _pink carnivorous bull-thing - as tall as I am, but only half standing upright - with a mouth three feet wide. That one is horrible. And then, that big _thing _you just killed... I saw it arrive here, carried in by four fire-spitters, while I cowered in hiding. It was much smaller, then. Its growth must be insane."

"That doesn't sound good..."

"No. Imagine what they could do on Earth, if they ever got there."

Bob's face turned grimmer. "You haven't seen any news from Earth recently. They're there."

"_What?" _he yelped. "The monsters got there already!?"

"Yes, they have. They teleported in all over the place, but those were generally alone or in small groups. The ones near inhabited areas have mostly been mopped up, though there's probably still many in the deserts. The major breakout points are where they landed small asteroids - they must have been full of monster spawn or something. There are several breakouts on each continent. We're containing it for now, but it's draining resources and costing many thousands of lives. It's an ugly thing. Earth couldn't spare much; otherwise, I would have been given some backup here."

"With Earth in trouble, why did they send you here anyway?"

"Well, to clean out remaining monsters and inspect the area. Mostly, though, to look for any way the demons could use it to reach Earth in greater force. The current situation is fragile; our defenses would break down totally with any significant increase in the demon opposition. This area has one of the Gate Anomalies; supposedly, they can be used for interplanetary travel."

"Well, let's see if we can find the Gate, so we can get done and get out of here."

They began to explore the room, looking for switches or hidden doors...


End file.
